Measuring help‐seeking behaviors: Factor structure, reliability, and validity among youth with disabilities

Abstract

Existing measures of help‐seeking focus on assessing attitudes and beliefs, rather than specific behaviors, toward help‐seeking. This study described the development of a self‐report measure of informal help‐seeking behaviors (HSB). Participants were 228 high school students (148 males, 80 females) with disabilities from four states. Factor analyses revealed three underlying factors, each addressing a different source of help: parent, peer, and teacher. The HSB had good internal reliability and moderate validity. Results from regression analyses suggested that help‐seeking behaviors toward parents and teachers contributed uniquely to students' self‐ratings of school bonding, life satisfaction, and career outcome expectations. Help‐seeking behaviors toward peers was a negative predictor of career outcome expectations. The value of the HSB as a research instrument was discussed.

Affective Teacher–Student Relationships and Students' Engagement and Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Update and Test of the Mediating Role of Engagement

“…Concepts like school connectedness, school attachment, and school bonding sometimes referred to students' feelings and reactions toward school, and hence could be included as an indicator of engagement. In other studies, however, these concepts also included, or solely focused on, feelings toward peers or adults at school and/or feeling safe at school (e.g., Joyce & Early, 2014;Pham, McWhirter, & Murray, 2014) and thus had to be excluded as not providing a pure measure of engagement or relationships. In these instances, we based our decision to include or exclude a certain concept or study on the specific items used to measure the concept.…”

Feasibility of a Web-Accessible Game-Based Intervention Aimed at Improving Help Seeking and Coping Among Sexual and Gender Minority Youth: Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Our secondary outcomes were: help-seeking intentions (General Help-Seeking Questionnaire [29] assessing likeliness to seek help for emotional problems and suicidal ideation from different sources); help-seeking self-efficacy (two subscales from Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Self-Efficacy [30]); help-seeking behaviors (adapted from the Help-Seeking Behaviors Scale [31]); coping skill usage (two subscales from Adolescent Coping Scale Second Edition Short Form [32]); coping flexibility (two subscales from Coping Flexibility Scale [33]); and knowledge and use of web-based resources (investigator-created indices [26]).…”

Pilot Testing the Feasibility of a Game Intervention Aimed at Improving Help Seeking and Coping Among Sexual and Gender Minority Youth: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

“…Help-seeking behaviors are assessed using items adapted from the Help-Seeking Behaviors Scale [96]. We adapted the scale to include the wide variety of help sources used in the aforementioned help-seeking intention scales.…”